mind reader

Dear friends,

Today I’d like to share some thoughts around a nexus point between an ongoing colonial capitalist modality of expropriation and the utterly uneven development of artificial intelligence technologies in high-technology western contexts. Both of these spaces are ridden with significant turbulence, colonialism and it’s capitalist modality (or vice-versa depending on your position in geopolitics) has held an extractivist mode closest to its heart since the 1700s, and as recent developments towards large language model technologies in artificial intelligence have burst onto the corporatising scene a slew of under-critiqued ideologies have nested into the heart of their explosive development.

We’ve discussed the origins of colonialism, and how colonialism drew on the experiment before it of enclosure and largely capitalist development. Here, we assert that colonisation, while ideologically compatible with many anti-human and anti-nature modalities, is largely concerned with the propagation of capitalist governance outside Europe. This brutal, genocidal approach desires hatred and division to enable uneven expansion and exploitation, mostly funnelling ill-gotten gains back to Europe. Care, here, is needed to ensure we do not collapse into universalising blame – yes, conditions for all across Europe were substantively better because of the brutal, anti-human, genocidal and fascistic advancement in the colonies, but at a time where information control was extremely tight, and the actual beneficiaries were very similar to those benefiting from capitalism today (a 1%), we need to localise ‘blame’ for this mould to a small container of people. The effects of their greedy, murderous, and discriminatory regime were felt by 99% in Europe, and 100% in the ‘colonies’.

The latest, in the line of colonial/capitalist malignancy, is the development of commercial ‘artificial intelligence’ technologies. The bounding ideology of LLMs is a regurgitation of western colonial capitalist modes the world over, because by its very nature, the technology that enables LLMs draws on mainstream knowledges, predominantly in English language. Most of the published world, especially in the form of newspaper articles, books, websites, and journal papers are written from a hegemonic position, for a hegemony which historically serviced and maintained the ‘thinkers’ in society. Gramscian theory, here, becomes particularly useful as a lens through which to examine the ideologies that are unashamedly distributed through artificial intelligences, not to mention the corporate and fundamentally anti-human way artificial intelligence software has been designed. This bifurcation: (1) the people, tools and technologies involved in the creation of the ‘LLM’ itself and (2) the works, sources of materials, and training approach of the first group, is simultaneously equally important. Exploited researchers, workers, and technologists who support the development of AI are extracted from by their 1% overlords. The product of their intelligence simultaneously reinforces the 99%/1% binary, and further extracts from the artistic, creative, and curious thinkers within the 99% (who are, largely, tied to the 1%’s ideology).

I think, therefore, it is useful for us to spend a moment longer considering the strength of hegemonic knowledge production as an artifact of history (at least from a historical materialist frame). Gramsci advanced that, at least in capitalist nations in the west, there was a dominant culture, a hegemony, whose ‘rulership’ was established through hard and soft modes. A rulership came to being by its capacity to, largely initially, by force capture a people, then by coercion maintain that control. The maintenance of this control required cultural and intellectual shaping – reintegration of divergent ideas to suit, or benefit, the hegemony which ruled. This explains a lot about all those Che Guevara t-shirts, and some System of a Down and Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. In a more human explanation, by subtly influencing the vital organs of a society – the media, education, law, armies, and so on – one could maintain control over something ‘captured’ and continue to grow its resilience through the co-optation of new ideas and their subsequent reintegration with the hegemony towards the ends that served those in positions of power. The cumulative ‘weight of history’ of our globalised, cancerous, and deeply toxic capitalism has so firmly rooted itself generationally that it has begun to shape the physical realities of our societies. Buildings, imaginations, worlds and lives are so deeply influenced by the power and weight of the hegemony of capitalism, and in the ouroboros of that ideology, under the powers of hegemony and history. We continue eating the foundations of our very existence (nature) through ideological advancement such that ‘capitalist realism’ the notion we cannot see outside this has grasped us all.

So when AI research begun to commercialise, far beyond its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, it brought with it both a mode (commercialisation, marketisation, acriticality) and a content (training data, model weights, preferences) that were uniquely capitalist in nature. As part of this, as we might imagine, that capitalist realism simultaneously advanced into the outputs of LLMs. Even with substantial prompt engineering, it is difficult to convince a commercial LLM to abjectly denounce capitalism – unless you use extremely decolonial or Marxist prompts (small joy). Because of this, AI becomes yet another tool in the promulgation of colonial capitalist rhetoric. Some LLMs have guardrails that prevent overtly racist, sexist, and grossly capitalist responses, but these are few and far between – with more problems emerging every day. Indeed, the model tweaking has had obvious effects on responses generated, sometimes day by day I get different responses from the same LLM that is clearly regurgitating its current guardrail (pro-capitalist, of course). For about two months Claude utterly refused to give me any anti-capitalist thought whatsoever, feeling particularly allergic to Marxism, while still surprisingly open to redescribing eastern and global southern theorists through western commentaries.

But there is some hope, on the horizon, here. Increasingly, as you may have seen me sharing on mind reader, overly comfortable middle class heterosexual cisgender white men are growing frustrated with the expropriation of their thinking and work. Be that in the form of their “creative” content posted online (pictures, writings, so on) or in the AI industry itself (with growing interest in open source AI models, thankfully). We know one thing for sure, as marginalised peoples, that once this category of people in a society begin to feel any vague tickle of political pressure on their positionality, things snap really quickly. And, no, I don’t just mean those that adamantly follow Joe Rogan’s latest codswallop. Past the initial vacuuming of the internet for training data, and beyond the tweaking and refinement to AI models, a nexus point at this hegemonic/AI border may actually offer an opportunity for change. But we’re not done here.

Gramsci was a firm believer in the power of (the) subaltern(s). For true revolution, he imagined, we would need disparate clusters of social interests to form adequate counter-hegemonic (alternative, verging revolutionary) modes that create a clear vision for different futures. These visions would need to unite people, through hope, joy, and opportunity, towards a future which is ‘possible’ – rather than the bleak, broken, and toxic reality that was capitalism. He hoped, as a Marxist, that this mode would be socialist in nature, that egalitarian ways of working could be developed not within extant capitalist structures, but that systems could be reinvented from the margins and by those at nexus points between margins such that a new intellectual class – a grounded and embodied kind of intellectual, rather than a mouthpiece for mainstream views – could devise, through strong community connections, a way of working that superseded the dominant. This work is not the work of one romanticised leader. Rather it was the collective work of every person, in every industry, across all facets of social and (re)productive life. Then, in true network effect, these marginalised thinkers, activists, workers, community members, could find each other as their visions drove them to more inclusive terrains, and enabled the bridging of connection that would offer analogous visions that would supplant capitalism.

So, good news, Sam Altman, you too can be extremely late to the party in your feeling of marginalisation and mild discomfort, and with those of us who have experienced intersectional, intergenerational violence and oppression are very happy to sit with you and exchange ideas about how we might radically rethink AI, technology, and work for a future that shares, co-constructs, and equalises. In seriousness, though, this meeting of ‘edges’ that are offered by resistance to AI’s appropriative nature which is finally being critiqued by the makers of AI themselves, no, not the Sam Altmans, but the researchers, computer nerds, and tech industry workers of the world offers another opportunity to grow counter-hegemonies. And through networking our counter-hegemonies together, in good dialogue and right relation, we might find that we are more capable as a species of custodianship and transformation that we are allowed to have credit for under capitalism. I could also be utterly delusional about just how ‘exploited’ AI workers really feel, and maybe this is still years away – but either way, we are all uniquely capable of using our context to strive towards egalitarianism and a better collective future, not a better future for the 1% who will end up living in underground bunkers when their manufactured apocalypse comes.

Stay cheery, friends,

Aidan

Dear friends,

Last week I shaved my head. Not a foreign experience, but foreign enough that I’m noticing feeling that I have always had but is now obvious in my conscious mind. Why tell you this? It feels similar to a critical awakening, that moment when you understand exactly what someone who carries knowledge really means when they say something profound. From the advice we receive, to the theory we read, the disembodied nature of much of our work and lives keeps us inside the capitalist frame. Making small changes, be it reading theory and finding a positional reality from that theory or exposing nerves through bravery or shaving which make us feel present is the human antidote to that disembodiment.

We humans are remarkable machines able to keep ‘grinding through’ but also able to perceive and transform our surroundings. Engagements with people, place, community, theory, reality, and so much more are fundamentally transformative to us – and this occurs regardless of us being conscious to it.

Today, from this embodied base, I want to talk about values and ethics, because I am noticing the humanity in the system and want to use my admittedly (relatively) small voice to raise that wherever possible. To find and reconnect with the emotional self that has been deliberately obscured through enclosure, colonisation, and so many more subtle (gruesome) technologies.

Capitalism, and particularly neoliberal capitalism [1], demands a handful of values, each of these comes with ‘caveats’ or negatives that directly undermine the 99%. Let’s examine some of the neoliberal capitalist traits:

• • economic efficiency: money for the wealthy,
• • individual liberty: militant individualism, concomitant with blame apportionment to the less ‘fortunate’ (itself a construct),
• • intense wealth creation: for the 1% oligarch class,
• • creative destruction: the constant change to justify more transactions, and
• • unbalanced risk/reward alignment (favouring the capitalist every time).

These give rise to a range of resultant values desirable of worker (humans). This conceptualisation automatically makes us think in particular ways, from the language used to understand values and ethics through to the propaganda that maintains such ways of thinking. For instance, if humans are depicted in language as ‘workers’, workers inherently ‘do work’, ergo workers are human and around we go in an endless propagandist/linguistic loop. Rather than dwell in circles of stupidity, let’s do some examination instead.

Extrapolating wildly from capitalism’s ‘stated values’ [2], we might hypothesise the following desirable traits in those workers. And, to do some hard labour, let’s balance the ideal vs the authoritarian likelihood which we see played out through Trumpian politics. Our derived ‘personal’ values might be:

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personal responsibility

In which we take initiative for our own economic advancement and never ask for external support.

Or, in an authoritarian turn, degrades into blame-shifting downward (punching down). Workers bear all responsibility for failures (even and especially systemic ones) while receiving no credit for success.

Responsibility is weaponised to justify cutting social supports while simultaneously removing workers’ agency to make meaningful choices about our conditions.

productivity and efficiency

In which we maximise ‘output’ and minimise waste of time and resources.

Or, in an authoritarian turn, is reduced to crude metrics detached from ‘actual value’ creation. Work intensifies as rest periods, safety measures, and long-term sustainability are sacrificed for immediate output.

Workers face algorithmic management systems with ever-increasing targets and diminishing returns on our efforts.

adaptability without curiosity

In which a willingness to be taught new skills and to accept ‘pivots’ as market change.

Or, in an authoritarian turn, enforcement of compliance with frequent, arbitrary changes. Workers must continuously adjust to new demands without questioning our purpose or seeking improvements.

work ethic

In which we are dedicated to our task, disciplined and commit to ‘quality’ as defined by the capitalist.

Or, under the authoritarian turn, devolves from any notion of intrinsic motivation to performative displays of busyness and loyalty. Actual effectiveness matters less than visible suffering and sacrifice. Long hours become a virtue regardless of output, leading to burnout and presenteeism rather than ‘contribution’.

rational self-interest

In which we make decisions which benefit ourselves economically above all. This one doesn’t need a flip side. But it’s never rational.

contractual integrity

In which we bind ourselves to agreements and building a reputation for reliability.

Under the authoritarian turn, this becomes fundamentally asymmetrical. Employers/authorities unilaterally change terms or selectively enforce provisions, while workers face severe consequences for increasingly minor infractions.

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It’s a bleak and shadowy world under the Trump/Musk oligopolist future, and it’s one that capitalism as a cancer has been driving us towards for over a century. With the achievement of global domination, even amongst the most remote communities, capitalism’s need for domination and control now grows to our minds. This frontier – the one that separates current day ‘western’ nations from the neo-Antipodes [3] – sees minds as the last landscape for subsumption of humanity into capitalist ‘value creation’. Be it neuralink [4] or the near inescapable pressure of hegemony, the active manipulation of our minds by capitalism is a project well underway. And so well equipped are languages, such as English, for the task of carving our lives into pieces that refuse mesh with our lived reality that we’re going to need to take a detour through linguistics for a second to orient ourselves. Stay with me, friends, we’re nearly there.

The English language subtly facilitates a separation between humans and our labour. Most notably, English has preference for nominalisation which transforms active processes into abstract entities – “production has increased” rather than “workers have produced more” – effectively removing human agents from the narrative. The passive voice construction further enables this distancing by allowing complete omission of actors, as in “products were manufactured” without specifying by whom. Moreover, English’s economic terminology – phrases such as “human resources”, “labour costs”, and “productivity” – conceptualises people as interchangeable components in economic processes rather than fulsome individuals.

Similarly, English creates distance between people and their emotional experiences through linguistic externalisation. Emotions are frequently framed as separate entities that act upon us (“fear gripped her”) rather than embodied experiences. Our language’s reliance on container metaphors, being “in love” or “full of anger”, reinforces this separation and treats emotions as distinct substances or locations separate from us. This externalisation creates conceptual boundaries between people and our feelings – all this distance manufactured in the way our language is shaped. Ever wondered why board meetings use such abstract language in their papers and discussions? Hmmm.

The rigid subject-verb-object structure of English further reinforces these separations by linguistically distinguishing actors from what they act upon. When we say “I built the house”, the structure creates inherent distance between builder and creation. This grammatical foundation, combined with increasingly specialised economic vocabulary, makes it remarkably easy to discuss products, processes, and emotions as detached from human experience. While this linguistic distancing enables certain forms of abstract thinking, it also facilitates a conceptual separation that has been used to normalise the alienation of workers from our labour and people from our emotions. This, a power move, a deliberate separation, a capitalist initiative, serves the particular economic and social arrangements that reinforce the hegemony of the 1%. So the method of exchange of ideas itself is deeply coloured by the capitalist ontology that frames our economic mode – thereby also conditioning the ontological reality in which we exist.

These linguistic patterns serve capital’s interests, making the relations of production appear as natural, inevitable facts rather than socially constructed arrangements that could be transformed. Just as capitalism extracts surplus value from labour while obscuring this exploitation, English extracts human agency from discourse while presenting this separation as “how language naturally works”. Oh it is but the deepening logic of commodity fetishism, casually penetrating even our grammar for the world. A joy – sorry do I come off as not thrilled?

When language habitually separates humans from our labour through passive constructions and nominalisation, it naturalises the value of ‘productivity and efficiency’ as abstract imperatives divorced from human experience. Workers are linguistically transformed into resources that should maximise our output, rather than creative beings engaged in … any kind of activity. The grammatical distancing mirrors and strengthens the ideological distancing required to view humans primarily as productive units. Moreover, the externalisation of emotions in English (“anger overtook me”) linguistically reinforces the value of rational self-interest by framing emotions as disruptive external forces to be controlled or suppressed rather than integral aspects of decision-making. This supports the capitalist ideal of the worker as a rational calculator unswayed by emotional considerations. Similarly, the subject-object distinction in English grammar reflects and reinforces contractual integrity as a value that requires clear boundaries between parties. This linguistic structure facilitates thinking about labour relationships as transactions between separate entities rather than collaborative human endeavours.

Under an authoritarian turn, these linguistic patterns become even more significant. As language increasingly obscures human agency in economic processes, it becomes easier to demand personal responsibility from workers while denying us power. The conceptual separation enabled by language makes it possible to maintain contradictory expectations – workers bear all responsibility for outcomes while having minimal control over conditions, precisely because our linguistic structures allow us to conceptualise labour apart from labourers.

But let’s not collapse into language, or despair, we have an opportunity through language to change things.

Resistance to capitalism’s values emerges primarily from the body. Bold claim, ey. This is the site where productivity demands, emotional management, and contractual obligations are most acutely felt and most persistently contested – in our very bodies. The embodied subject refuses complete reduction to economic utility through (even small) practices of defiance. Choosing rest despite productivity imperatives, experiencing emotions that disrupt rational calculation, or creating physical spaces where different values can flourish, for instance. This resistance operates linguistically when we deliberately restructure our speech to foreground human agency, replacing passive constructions with active declarations of collective power. “We built this” instead of “this was built” – naming and actively centring agency in language as an act of political assertion, and not a particularly hard one at that. Similarly, we might honour embodied temporality (hunger, fatigue, desire, illness) that follow organics which are incompatible with capitalist time, this can constitute a temporal rebellion against the demand for constant acceleration. Our bodies here might become a site where alternative values can be physically enacted through practices which capitalism cannot easily recuperate, for instance shared joy without consumption, communal pleasure requiring no purchase, or collective grief that builds solidarity rather than isolation. Hello resistance.

Embodied resistances don’t seek some mythical pre-capitalist purity [5] instead we construct new possibilities (within and) against existing conditions, recognising lines of flight [6]. Resistance includes performative contradictions that exploit the gaps between prescribed roles and lived experience. Be it “quiet quitting”: the worker who appears productive while doing nothing of market value, or the activist who creates temporary autonomous zones where hierarchies (temporarily) dissolve – active or passive, resistance is everything against these capitalist values and ethics. The spatial reappropriations create real spaces where dominant values are suspended, and alternatives practiced – counter-hegemonies. What makes such resistance particularly potent is its recognition that power is productive, and thus, effective resistance doesn’t just defy capitalist values but actively creates alternatives through (embodied) practices, or praxes. The body that refuses to separate itself from its labour, that insists on experiencing emotions as integral rather than external, and that builds community through shared vulnerability enacts a politics where abstract values are constantly brought back to their material consequences, challenging the linguistic and conceptual separations upon which capitalism depends.

So, you know, preaching a practice I’ve yet to master – get back in your body, folks.

With love,

Aidan

[1] which I’ve begun elsewhere to argue is fading away in favour of something much worse – a fascist capitalism.

[2] these are extremely hard to pin down in an agreeable way. And therein lies some of the problem, the actual ‘pain’ that is capitalism demands indescribability – and through its production of language tropes creates division and distraction from its reality. Nasty piece of ‘intellectual’ work.

[3] here I mean to say ideological communities which may fall beyond the reach of deep-seated post-neoliberal capitalism through their ideological distance from capitalism’s western centre.

[4] Musk’s literal mind control project.

[5] And just what the fuck would that even be, let’s be real, none of us have a non-polluted view of what “pre-capitalism” was anyway. Everything is told through interpretation on interpretation. Get out of here “cave man living”.

[6] Hello Deleuze – no, I still don’t understand your work.

Dear friends,

You may have observed that I’ve been pondering the nature of our broken worlds, in particular how this has deep effects on our bodies. From immovable structures, (self)imposed or otherwise, to external features of capitalist system(s) which offer a guise of stability and security but, in reality, limit human agency to capitalist realism, we are conditioned to work above all. This is of interest to me, as I continuously engage with friends and colleagues who suffer with physical ailments derived from constant exposure to high-stress environments. We are so conditioned with this that even our language fails adequately describe how aversely we react to our experienced environments, and often exact even further tolls on ourselves by internalising that which should be processed communally. Just today, I was talking to friends about self-imposed structures that condition agency under the guise of anti-capitalist movement, but in reality, exact tolls on mental health that are tantamount to the same violations of self and community. Sound familiar? No? Let me expand.

Let’s first turn to First Peoples’ perspectives on the role of emotional, cultural, social and place-based tolls on the body. Experienced through connection with country and community, the phenomenon of embodied trauma shows a severing, or disconnection between a person and their community, country or role. We might understand across much of the global south and in First Nations communities the world over that existence is fundamentally relational and cyclical. Here, disruptions to right relations (i.e., caring for country, community, and so on) manifest as embodied distress. For many knowledge systems, there is an inherent recognition that human bodies exist within intricate webs of kinship, relationship, and responsibility that extend beyond human communities to include more-than-human relations, ancestral connections, and spiritual dimensions, as well as connections to place. Colonial capitalism has systematically targeted these relational networks through land dispossession, (cultural) genocide, and the imposition of extractive temporalities that sever these connections as they did in enclosures before them.

The enforced separation from land-based practices, ceremonial rhythms, and intergenerational knowledge transmission creates conditions where trauma becomes inscribed in both ‘individual bodies’ and in collective, intergenerational experience, bodies, lands and thought. Globally, a great deal of First Nations healing traditions understand wellness as emerging from balanced relationships between physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions — a harmony of (eco)systems that oppressive systems deliberately disrupt through the colonial project’s ongoing violence.

First Nations frameworks for understanding embodied distress may centre concepts of balance, reciprocity, and cyclical time that stand in direct opposition to capitalism’s linear extraction, accumulation, and exploitation. Our body’s manifestation of illness under stress represents, not personal ‘malfunction’, a profound truth-telling about the violation of natural laws and proper relations — the body bearing witness to the unsustainability of systems that fragment our fundamental interconnectedness with all relations. So, yeah, our systems are pretty fucked for us as humans — and this is nearly universal.

In a “western” paradigm, the human body exists as a biopsychosocial system where trauma becomes inscribed upon both psychological memory and a kind of somatic reality. The body’s stress response mechanisms, evolved for acute survival situations, become chronically activated under persistent socioeconomic pressures, leading to allostatic load and physiological dysregulation. I’m going to hurl some more words at you now and we’ll regroup in a moment — don’t hold your breath. Neuroendocrine pathways, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, translate emotional distress into inflammatory cascades, immunosuppression, and literally altered gene expression through epigenetic modifications. With capitalism’s increasing precarity, fascist authoritarian turn, and global distress, comorbid with relentless productivity demands and insecure socioeconomic conditions, creates a state of perpetual hypervigilance that fundamentally contradicts our neuro/biological need for rhythmic alternation between engagement and restoration. This systematic mismatch between our ‘evolutionary design’ and contemporary socioeconomic structures manifests as embodied distress — the body’s material critique of systems that violate its fundamental requirements for regulation, connection, and meaning. So, yeah, capitalism also messes up our sleep patterns, capacity for rest and renewal, and we get into even more trouble.

Sleep offers a fundamental ‘neurobiological rhythm’ where the brain undergoes essential maintenance processes: synaptic homeostasis, memory consolidation, and metabolic waste clearance. Capitalist temporalities systematically destabilise and disrupt this through productivity imperatives and chronobiological destabilisation [1]. First Nations frameworks understand sleep as an important liminal and connective state which supports connectivity with ancestral knowledge, wisdom from dreams, and other spiritual dimensions, an ontologically rich experience. Colonial capitalist temporalities deliberately fragmented these through ‘settler time’ [2] the imposition of mechanistic, production-oriented temporalities that sever people from rhythms and dream-based knowledge systems which secure to cultural continuity and healing practices.

From this position of understanding physical effects of capitalist “structures” on the body, we should now turn briefly to how we engage with this as human ‘agents’ against systemic capital/colonial ‘structure’. Or engage once again with the structure and agency debate to try and negotiate some space for individual and collective resistance to (self)imposed harms.

We’ve discussed before how the tension between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ exists within a dialectical framework where subjects are simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of social structures. Foucault offers a prominent example in which he discusses how power operates through repression and through productive processes that shape subjects’ self-understanding and perceived possibilities [3]. Althusser offers interpellation, which discusses how ideological state apparatuses produce subjects who misrecognise our structural determinations as freely chosen identities [4]. And late capitalism’s particular innovation lies in its capacity to subsume resistance through commodification while naturalising its contradictions through increasingly sophisticated cultural technologies that manufacture consent while concealing structural violence behind ‘discourses’ of individual responsibility and meritocratic fantasy [5]. So, there are myriad theoretical frames through which to understand capitalism’s bullshit. Some of them empower us to take action as resistance, such as literally ‘sleep as resistance’, others suggest that structural reform must be negotiated or seized through activist transformation. But either way, the violence of capitalism is long conceived as a physical violence – whether by spear or by ideology.

First Nations conceptualisations, on the other hand, fundamentally reconfigure structure-agency binaries through relational ontologies, where personhood emerges through kinship networks extending beyond individual humans into communities. Agency exists far beyond individual autonomy through responsible participation within complex reciprocal relationships across deep time [6]. Colonial capitalist structures operate through what ongoing settler colonial governmentality and violence and deliberately targets First Nations relational autonomy through ontological impositions that fragment collective governance systems and connection to country. Resurgence movements have conceptualised decolonial agency beyond ‘individual liberation’ (‘take the white hand’) as the revitalisation of governance systems, ceremonial practices, and language reclamation that restore proper relationships. There’s powerful resistance offered here, and more powerful futuristic thinking available in relation and conversation.

Contestation of these interlocking systems of ‘embodied exploitation’ requires multi-dimensional approaches grounded to ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’ [7]. Prefigurative politics that embody different temporalities and ontologies such as degrowth movements, create practices that honour biological rhythms and ecological limits while resurgence frameworks articulated centre Country’s reclamation and revitalization, also serving as pathways toward communal healing. Disability justice movements offer crucial insights into sustainable activism ways of being that honour bodily limits and interdependence as sources of wisdom rather than limitations to overcome [8]. These convergent movements gesture toward social arrangements fundamentally organised around care relationships rather than capital accumulation, where thriving becomes possible through the cultivation of social infrastructure which recognises vulnerability and interdependence as foundational to human flourishing rather than impediments to productivity.

Food for thought,

Aidan

[1] c.f. Matthew, W. (2018). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.

[2] Rifkin, M. (2017). Beyond settler time: Temporal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. Duke University Press.

[3] Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.

[4] Althusser, L. (1976). Positions (1964-1975): Freud et Lcan, la philodphie comme arme de la révolution. Éditions sociales. (no, I didn’t read this in French, I just couldn’t find my reference for the English translation)

[5] Jameson, F. (2005). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke Univ. Press. (yes, we’ve been calling it late capitalism since as early as 1991)

[6] Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press. (strongly recommend)

[7] https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf

[8] Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.